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                                                            Sing, Sing, Sing, and Dance

               “There is no such thing as hell, of course, but if there was, then the sound track to the screaming, the pitchfork action and the infernal wailing of damned souls would be a looped medley of ‘show tunes’ drawn from the annals of musical theater.” Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

I took a six-week course at my residence, Topics in American Musical Theater. It was presented by a marvelous teacher, Dan Egan, who also teaches at Yale. We students were charged with watching a specific musical or two before each class and were also given some short reading. We started with Oklahoma!, the seminal show integrating music, lyrics, text, and dance.

The second week we moved on to Kiss Me Kate (by happenstance, the spouse is in a play-reading group making its way through Taming of the Shrew) and Guys and Dolls. I watched an online version of Kiss Me, which I had not seen before. Not my favorite. I also watched the movie Guys and Dolls, which I had seen before. The film is not the encapsulation of the stage show, since four or five songs were dropped from the movie, including “A Bushel and a Peck,” which I remember my mother singing when I was a tyke. When I first saw the movie, I thought Marlon Brando was miscast. This time I realized that Frank Sinatra was out of place, but I had seen a wonderful revival on Broadway with the always marvelous Nathan Lane. I came out, however, not humming any of his songs but singing “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat.”

The next week we considered West Side Story and Music Man. I had seen movie versions of both. Some years ago the spouse and I went to see a re-release of the 1961 West Side Story at a small theater in Brooklyn. Just before its start, a dozen male and female students from a nearby “elite” high school walked in. When the whistling and the finger popping and the crouched dancing began, the teenage-boy jokes started flying. The scene was easy to make fun of, and even the St. Anne’s students could think they were tougher than these 1950s dancing juvenile delinquents. The students, however, soon settled into watch. By the end, most were crying. Seeing it again this time, both the spouse and I were in tears, too.

I have seen the Music Man movie many more times since it was something the son watched over and over and over again at one stage of childhood. Because he liked it so much, I took him to a summer stock production of the musical. He came out critical. It did not have Robert Preston. It starred Gary Sandy, best known as a star of WKRP in Cincinnati. The production seemed more semi-professional than professional, and I learned that every presentation of a classical musical is not necessarily worth attending. Somewhat to my surprise, I have never seen a stage production of West Side Story.

I did not know that these two quite different musicals opened a few months apart and vied for that year’s Tony award with Meredith Wilson’s production winning in a controversial, close vote. The assigned reading maintained that the two plays showed different ways of dealing with America’s race or ethnic differences. Of course, West Side Story deals with those issues, but I was not convinced about Music Man. The thesis just seemed to be an academic overreach. I was pleased, however, that the instructor played a video of Larry Kert, the original Broadway Tony, singing. He had a marvelous voice. We did not discuss, however, the appropriateness of movies casting leads and then dubbing their singing as was done in West Side Story, or Natalie Wood’s attempt at a Puerto Rican accent.

I also felt as if I irritated the instructor that class. I had privately corrected him a week or two before. He was talking about Vaudevillian villains who twirled their mustaches and referred to such a person as Dudley Do-Right. As a devoted follower of George of the Jungle, I knew he meant Snidely Whiplash. Dan graciously accepted the correction. That was minor, but it felt more important when he labeled the Jets in West Side Story as W.A.S.Ps. I, privately told him that there was no way a gang on the west side in 1950s New York were white Anglo-Saxon protestants. In fact, there is a point in the production where ethnic slurs are tossed about and Tony, an original leader of the Jets, is called a Polack. I said the Jets were not high up on the social ladder, only a bit higher than the Sharks, and that was part of the reason for the intense bitterness between them. Dan maintained that in the literature the Jets are called wasps. I said that if so, those commentators were wrong. That seemed to irritate him, and I dropped the topic.

The “students” in the course were of my generation, and several repeatedly made the point that they did not like contemporary musicals because they were no longer musical. Many seemed almost hostile when we turned to Sweeney Todd, where hummable tunes were few but strident,  emotionally powerful singing plentiful. The instructor did a marvelous job explicating the innovative music and the remarkable lyrics. The repeated T sound in “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,” for example, is brilliant, but so is much else in the show. I had seen a filmed version of Sweeney Todd with the always marvelous Angela Lansbury and George Hearn, and one Broadway production featuring Patti Lupone (she played the tuba), but I had not fully realized Sweeney Todd’s brilliance until I was led through it by Dan.

We finished with Hamilton. Time and again during the class I had heard how someone had gone to the show with their grandchildren, who loved it, while the grandparent had gotten little from it. Once again, however, the class opened my eyes and ears. I realized how remarkable Hamilton is, a truly transformative musical. Thanks, Dan.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I recently saw the play Patriots, which was written by Peter Morgan and directed by Rupert Gold. The production came from London where it won awards. I knew that the play had something to do with Vladimir Putin but didn’t know much beyond that. Within a few minutes, I realized, however, that I was familiar with the story from having read Masha Gessen’s book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. In both the play and book, we learn how Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky elevated the obscure bureaucrat Putin from insignificance to the dictator of Russia. The play — the set, the acting, the direction, the writing — was outstanding. I enjoyed it, but it also made me think about the creative process. How does one learn about Berezovsky and Putin and decide to make a play about their dynamics? How does one read Ron Chernow’s Hamilton and decide to make a hip-hop musical of it? How does one read American Prometheus and decide to make a movie of it?

The menu said that a dish contained “tofu and other stuff.” I eschewed it.

Are desert flowers more vibrant than others or does it just seem that way?

I apparently need to learn more about the Bible. Or football. Or perhaps both. Deion Sanders, now a football coach, in promoting his book Motivate and Dominate: 21 Ways to Win On and Off the Field, was asked: “What book (fiction or nonfiction) best captures the game of football as you know it?” Sanders replied, “The Bible.”

A friend said, “All my life I said I wanted to be someone. . . . I can see now that I should have been more specific.”

From her dress, I pegged her as a street person. She was pushing a cart filled with bulging kitchen trash bags. She reached into one. She pulled out latex gloves. She put them on. She reached back into the bag and pulled out sanitizing wipes. She then scrubbed the subway seat before sitting down.

At a New England town’s used book sale, a friend held up Smallbone Deceased and said I would like it. I did. The mystery by Michael Gilbert published in 1950 is set in a London solicitor’s office where the corpse of Marcus Smallbone is discovered in a large deed box. I had not heard of Michael Gilbert before, but I learned that he was a practicing solicitor as well as the author of many books in different styles. Perhaps what I found most intriguing is that Gilbert only wrote on his weekday commute from the suburbs to London, averaging five hundred words a day. This schedule produced over thirty novels and more than 180 short stories. I assume he commuted by train, and since I also assume that he was writing in longhand, his train rides were smoother than my subway trips.

The first mysteries I remember reading were Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks. The Library of Congress cataloging data printed on the copyright page above the ISBN for Freddy the Detective states: “Brooks, Walter R. (1886-1958) with illustrations by Kurt Wiese. Summary: Freddy the pig does some detective work in order to solve the mystery of a missing toy train.” Below the ISBN it continues: [1. Pigs—Fiction 2. Domestic animals—fiction. 3. Mystery and detective stories.] How could you not want to read this?

My idea for a book group: Everyone reads three-quarters of the same mystery and then gets together for a discussion.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The NRA recently had its convention. It is held only once a year. Mass shootings occur, however, more than once a week. And other gun crimes and gun suicides occur multiple times each day.

Guns were not allowed in the NRA convention hall when Trump addressed the assemblage. I did not hear any protests that this restriction violated Second Amendment rights.

Some people see gun possession as a God-given right, and a greater percentage of white evangelicals own guns than other demographic groups.

Sometimes people ask what type(s) of firearm(s) Jesus will possess when He comes back to save us. However, I don’t see how he will pass a background check; He was convicted of a felony.

I was taught it was demeaning and wrong to refer to a person as “it.” If so, I am confused how to refer to some people. The Supreme Court has told me that corporations are people with free speech and religious rights. What is the proper pronoun when I am referring to a corporation? Interestingly, the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision referred to the corporation as an “it.” (I have previously written about pronouns in my post “People the Barricades! We Need a Pronoun Revolution,” June 28 and July 1, 2019.)

A physicist has posited that dark matter was not created in the initial Big Bang, but in another Big Bang a few weeks later. I am sure that there could be lots of questions about this hypothesis, but I wonder how time such as “weeks” was measured during the universe’s infancy.

Shouldn’t Dan Feyer be more well known, which means shouldn’t I have heard of him before this week? Recently he won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament championship for the ninth time.

At a car rental place in Cancun, a clerk mistook me for a famous “announcer.” I had no idea who she had in mind, but I did not disabuse of her mistake. Perhaps, I thought, it will get me better service. That was my mistake.

If we are to make the rest of America like Florida, we will increase the nation’s infant mortality. Florida ranks in the bottom half of the states when it comes to baby deaths.

Watching a beer ad, I wondered, Why, if you have a good tasting beer, would you put a lime in it?

Phantom of the Opera, Broadway’s longest-running show, recently closed. I live in New York City and go to the theater frequently, but I never saw Phantom. I never saw Cats either. I have not seen Wicked. I have not seen Hamilton on the stage. However, I have seen Topdog/Underdog and Shucked.

New York has forty-one venues classified as Broadway theaters. Only six of them were built after 1927 although many of them have been refurbished over the last century. The peak of Broadway was from 1923-29 with more than two hundred new shows opening every year during that span. Forty-one new shows opened on Broadway from May 2022 through April 2023.